Dedicated or shared hours
A full-time assistant, a part-time block or a shared pool, priced by how much you actually need.
Hiring an assistant is not really a staffing problem, it is a process problem. Most of the pain people describe with virtual assistants comes from the same three failures: nobody wrote the process down, so the assistant guessed; nobody defined what to escalate, so either everything came back or nothing did; and when the assistant took leave or left, the knowledge left with them. None of those are fixed by finding a better individual.
We staff the role and run the process around it. You get a named assistant, working hours that overlap yours, written standard operating procedures built during onboarding and kept current, a supervisor who reviews the work, and a second trained person who covers leave. Access is granted through your own accounts with an NDA signed before day one. If the assistant is not right, we replace them, and the documented process means the replacement is productive in days rather than months.
Most VA engagements fail on process, not on people
When somebody tells us their last virtual assistant did not work out, the story is almost always the same. The assistant was given a login and a vague description of the job, nobody wrote down how the work was actually done, and for the first month every question came back to the person who was supposed to be freed up. Then either the questions stopped and mistakes started, or the client concluded it was faster to do it themselves.
None of that is a talent problem. It is the absence of three things: a written process, a defined escalation boundary, and somebody supervising the output. Put those in place and an ordinary competent assistant performs well. Leave them out and an excellent one still struggles, because they are guessing at a standard nobody has stated.
So the first two weeks of any engagement we run are onboarding, not output. Tasks are observed, documented and turned into standard operating procedures as the assistant learns them. The client feels slower in week one and materially faster by week four, which is the honest shape of the curve.
Dedicated, part-time or shared, and how to choose
A dedicated assistant works only on your account for a fixed number of hours a day. They learn your business, your customers and your preferences, and after a couple of months they anticipate rather than ask. It is the right structure above roughly twenty hours a week of genuine work, and it is the only structure that works for anything requiring judgement or relationship continuity.
Part-time blocks give you the same named person for a smaller commitment, typically four hours a day or a set number of hours a week. Most small businesses start here, and many stay, because the honest amount of delegable work is smaller than they first estimated.
A shared pool is right when volume is unpredictable or the tasks are highly proceduralised: data entry batches, overflow support during a sale, seasonal reservation cover. It costs less per hour and you lose continuity, so it is a poor fit for anything where the assistant needs to remember last week.
Time zones, shifts and what overlap actually buys you
Working with an Indian team, you choose one of two shapes. Overlap, where the assistant works your hours so you can talk in real time, ask a question and get an answer, and hand something over mid-afternoon. Or handover, where the assistant works while you sleep and you wake to completed work and a briefing.
Overlap suits executive support, live customer contact and anything collaborative. We run UK hours, US Eastern, US Pacific and Australian shifts as well as IST, and a full-day overlap with a US Pacific client means a night shift in India, which we staff and pay for accordingly.
Handover suits production work: research compiled overnight, listings updated before your morning, tickets cleared, reports built. It is genuinely the more efficient pattern for the right tasks, because your working day starts with the output rather than the request. The mistake is choosing handover for work that needs a conversation, then wondering why everything takes two days.
Documentation is the asset, and it belongs to you
The SOPs written during onboarding are the most valuable thing produced by a VA engagement, and most clients do not realise it until they need them. They are what makes leave cover possible without a handover meeting, what makes replacing an assistant a matter of days rather than months, and what turns tacit knowledge in one person's head into something the business owns.
We write them as we go rather than as a project at the end: screen recordings for anything visual, written steps with decision rules for anything with a judgement in it, and a change log so a process that shifts is not left half-documented. They live in your drive, not ours.
If you end the engagement, the documentation stays with you. That is deliberate. An agency that retains the process knowledge has made you dependent on it, and we would rather be kept because the work is good than because leaving is painful.
Security, access and what we will not do
Access is granted through your own systems under named, role-limited accounts, never a shared login and never your personal password. Credentials move through a password manager, not chat or email. NDAs and confidentiality agreements are signed by the assistant and by us before day one, and access is revoked the same day an assignment ends.
There are things we decline. We do not have assistants operate your bank accounts or make payments. We do not take on work that requires impersonating you in a legally significant context. We do not handle regulated personal or health data without scoping the controls in writing first, and sometimes that scoping ends with us saying it is not a fit.
Those limits cost us a small amount of business and they are not negotiable. An assistant with the ability to move money is a risk to you that no efficiency gain justifies, and any provider willing to wave that through is one you should look at more carefully.
What a virtual assistant is not
A VA executes a defined process reliably. That is a genuinely valuable thing and it is not the same as a strategist, a specialist or a manager. An assistant can run your outreach sequence; they cannot decide your positioning. They can maintain your listings; they cannot build your pricing strategy. They can schedule your posts; they cannot invent your brand voice.
The engagements that disappoint are usually the ones where a client hoped a low-cost assistant would quietly turn into a marketing manager. It does not happen, and stretching the role produces work that is mediocre in both directions.
When we scope a role and the task list is really a specialist job, we say so before quoting. Sometimes that means recommending a smaller VA engagement alongside a specialist, and sometimes it means telling you a VA is not the answer at all. Selling hours that will not deliver is a short conversation followed by a long problem.